DavidNash

• DavidNash 21 Nov 2019 11:01 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: I’m Buck Sh­legeris, I do re­search and out­reach at MIRI, AMA

  I think similar ar­eas were cov­ered in these two posts as well 80,000 Hours—how to read our ad­vice and Thoughts on 80,000 Hours’ re­search that might help with job-search frus­tra­tions.

• DavidNash 16 Nov 2019 12:04 UTC

  7 points

  on: EA Hand­book 3.0: What con­tent should I in­clude?

  There was a Face­book post on top 10 con­cepts for peo­ple to know in EA.

  Here are some of the sug­ges­tions.

  • Cause neutrality

  • Scale, Ne­glect­ed­ness and Solv­abil­ity framework

  • Max­imis­ing welfare

  • Mo­ral pa­tient-hood

  • Mo­ral uncertainty

  • Mo­ral trade

  • Longtermism

  • Hits-based giving

  • Wor­ld­view diversification

  • Earn­ing-to-give

  • Com­par­a­tive advantage

  • Epistemic principles

  • Cru­cial Con­sid­er­a­tions

  
  

  I think some of the points in this 80,000 Hours ar­ti­cle ap­ply to EA in general

  • We’ve been wrong be­fore, and we’ll be wrong again

  • Many of the ques­tions we tackle are a mat­ter of bal­ance, and differ­ent peo­ple will benefit from con­sid­er­ing op­pos­ing messages

  • Per­sonal fit mat­ters, so fo­cus more on strate­gies than sim­ple answers

  • There are dis­agree­ments within the community

  • Treat do­ing good as just one of many im­por­tant goals in life

  
  

  Also this one—Mis­con­cep­tions of 80,000 Hours re­search (al­though maybe they wont be mis­con­cep­tions if it is the first thing they read)

  • Roles out­side ex­plic­itly EA or­gani­sa­tions are most peo­ple’s best ca­reer op­tions.

  • Some­times these roles aren’t as visi­ble to the com­mu­nity, in­clud­ing to 80,000 Hours, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t highly im­pact­ful.

  • Many es­pe­cially im­pact­ful roles re­quire spe­cific skills. If none of these roles are cur­rently a great fit for you, but one could be if you de­vel­oped the right skills, it can be worth it to take sub­stan­tial time to do so.

  • You should use 80,000 Hours to figure out what your best ca­reer is and how to get there, not what “the” best ca­reers are.

  
  

  I’d add in differ­ent ways of hav­ing im­pact and how they gen­er­ally com­pare as peo­ple of­ten ask about why EA doesn’t do much in one of the fol­low­ing; ca­reer, dona­tions, vol­un­teer­ing, in­fluence/​vot­ing and per­sonal consumption

  Also some ar­ti­cles that I’ve shared quite reg­u­larly with peo­ple newer to EA.

  Why choose a cause and how to strate­gi­cally choose a cause

  6 tips on choos­ing an effec­tive charity

  Where I am donat­ing this year

  Giv­ing Cheerfully

  Effec­tive al­tru­ism as ques­tion

• DavidNash 15 Nov 2019 23:16 UTC

  7 points

  on: Seek­ing Mar­ket­ing & Sales + EA Pro­ject/​Work Ideas

  One idea is for them to co­or­di­nate the global com­mu­nity of peo­ple in mar­ket­ing/​sales who are in­ter­ested in EA.

  Pro­vid­ing a point of en­try for other mar­keters to see where the best places may be for them to work, what skills to build and what net­works to join so that they can have more pos­i­tive im­pact.

  This may in­clude a newslet­ter ev­ery few months high­light­ing job op­por­tu­ni­ties and ex­am­ples of mar­ket­ing for good, an on­line group(FB/​Slack/​etc) for peo­ple to swap ideas and po­ten­tially get men­tor­ship.

• DavidNash 15 Nov 2019 13:34 UTC

  2 points

  on: An­nounc­ing plans for a Ger­man Effec­tive Altru­ism Net­work fo­cused on Com­mu­nity Building

  I think that this is a good plan and it would be in­ter­est­ing to hear if there have been any up­dates in the last 4 months.

  I agree with a lot of the other com­ments but one thing I haven’t no­ticed is how to provide value to the wider net­work of peo­ple in Ger­many who have an in­ter­est in EA but may not want to go to events or be­come heav­ily en­gaged.

EA Up­dates for Oc­to­ber 2019

• DavidNash 10 Oct 2019 13:28 UTC

  19 points

  on: List of EA-al­igned email newslet­ters (did I miss any?)

  I don’t have a com­plete list, but here are quite a few of the or­gani­sa­tions that I sub­scribe to for up­dates.

  
  

  Long Term Future

  Fu­ture of Life Institute

  Fu­ture of Hu­man­ity Institute

  Global Pri­ori­ties Institute

  Cen­tre for the Study of Ex­is­ten­tial Risk

  Global Catas­trophic Risk Institute

  Ar­tifi­cial Intelligence

  Cen­ter for Se­cu­rity and Emerg­ing Technology

  Oxford In­ter­net Institute

  DeepMind

  Lev­er­hulme Cen­tre for the Fu­ture of Intelligence

  Google AI

  OpenAI

  Alan Tur­ing Institute

  An­i­mal Welfare

  Cel­lu­lar Agri­cul­ture UK

  Faunalytics

  An­i­mal Char­ity Evaluators

  Good Food Institute

  An­i­mal Ad­vo­cacy Careers

  Sen­tience Institute

  The Hu­mane League

  Farm An­i­mal Welfare Newslet­ter from OPP

  An­i­mal Ethics

  Wild An­i­mal Institute

  But Can They Suffer

  Global Development

  The Life You Can Save

  Devex In­ter­na­tional Development

  GiveWell

  Cen­tre for Global Development

  GiveDirectly

  J-PAL

  Global In­no­va­tion Fund

  Wel­l­come Trust (also im­prov­ing in­sti­tu­tions)

  In­ter­na­tional Ini­ti­a­tive for Im­pact Evaluation

  AidGrade

  In­no­va­tions for Poverty Action

  For­tify Health

  Copen­hagen Con­sen­sus Centre

  Char­ity Science Health

  Gates Foundation

  Schis­to­so­mi­a­sis Con­trol Initiative

  Overseas Devel­op­ment Institute

  Devel­op­ment Me­dia International

  Against Malaria Foundation

  Malaria Consortium

  Ev­i­dence Action

  Hap­pier Lives Institute

  Im­prov­ing Institutions

  Cam­bridge Cen­tre for Science and Policy

  Camp­bell Collaboration

  Cen­tre for Ex­cel­lence in Devel­op­ment and Learning

  Our World in Data

  Cen­tre for Open Science

  To Be Decided

  UCL In­sti­tute for In­no­va­tion and Public Purpose

  Effec­tive Altruism

  Effec­tive Altru­ism Newslet­ter (by CEA, EA Hub and Re­think Char­ity)

  Fu­ture Perfect

  Char­ity Entrepreneurship

  80,000 Hours

  80k Sup­port­ers Updates

  Cen­tre for Effec­tive Altruism

  Open Philan­thropy Project

  Re­think Priorities

  EA Groups Newsletter

  Philanthropy

  The Cen­ter for Effec­tive Philanthropy

  Founders Pledge

  Non Profit Chronicles

  Gen­eral In­ter­est

  Clearer Thinking

  Conceptually

  Matt’s Thoughts In Between—Founder of En­trepeneur First

• DavidNash 5 Oct 2019 14:27 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Holly_Elmore's comment on: Why did MyGiv­ing need to be re­placed? And why is the Effec­tiveAltru­ism.org re­place­ment so bad?

  I thought it was so that it tied in with EA Funds, which is some­thing that made me think CEA was pay­ing much more at­ten­tion to dona­tions, mak­ing a unified sys­tem that also al­lowed peo­ple to donate from one plat­form and au­to­mat­i­cally record dona­tions.

  Although I agree that re­peated dona­tions not be­ing an op­tion is quite an­noy­ing.

• DavidNash 3 Oct 2019 7:55 UTC

  3 points

  on: Chart show­ing effec­tive­ness of school­ing internvetions

  I used these images for a slide show a few years ago, the origi­nal source be­ing this re­port by CEA (page 6).

  That might be old data though, this is the most up to date ver­sion on JPALs web­site.

• DavidNash 1 Oct 2019 15:30 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: EA Hand­book 3.0: What con­tent should I in­clude?

  I don’t think ad­dress­ing these ques­tions in a hand­book that’s meant to in­tro­duce EA would be that use­ful as most of them re­quire much more in depth read­ing than a few para­graphs would al­low.

  It may make more sense to have an FAQ for these typ­i­cal ques­tions or to say that lots of ar­eas within EA are still be­ing dis­cussed, and then list the ques­tions.

Lat­est EA Up­dates for Septem­ber 2019

• DavidNash 26 Sep 2019 19:43 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Carl_Shulman's comment on: Sum­mary of my aca­demic pa­per “Effec­tive Altru­ism and Sys­temic Change”

  I think this is a re­ally good com­ment and prob­a­bly should be it’s own post.

  A minor point, I would say that giv­ing to the Against Malaria Foun­da­tion may not on it’s own be sys­temic change, but if enough peo­ple keep on giv­ing to char­i­ties that are eval­u­ated on their im­pact, it could change in­di­vi­d­ual giv­ing as a sys­tem, as char­i­ties re­spond to these new in­cen­tives.

  What links here?

  • Some per­sonal thoughts on EA and sys­temic change by Carl_Shulman (26 Sep 2019 21:40 UTC; 176 points)

• DavidNash 18 Sep 2019 15:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jessica_mccurdy's comment on: Op­ti­miz­ing Ac­tivi­ties Fairs

  A two stage strat­egy might be best, out­reach for the first week, then core com­mu­nity the rest of the semester.

  It may be that get­ting lots of email sign ups can be okay to then pass on 80,000 Hours ma­te­rial, the first few events and 1-1 sign up. I’ve heard from quite a few peo­ple that they first heard of EA at a uni­ver­sity fair and kept on get­ting the 80,000 Hours emails and then got much more in­volved once they started work­ing 3-5 years later.

  After fo­cus­ing on out­reach for the first week, I agree it prob­a­bly makes sense to fo­cus on the core 5-30 peo­ple who are ac­tu­ally in­ter­ested in EA rather than try­ing to put on events for the wider stu­dent au­di­ence that signed up to ev­ery­thing but wont re­ally come to any­thing.

  
  

  If there is a situ­a­tion where some­one is re­ally in­ter­ested but it’s hec­tic, I would put a note by their name to re­mem­ber to reach out to them in­di­vi­d­u­ally rather than pri­ori­tis­ing the 5 minute con­ver­sa­tion.

• DavidNash 17 Sep 2019 9:58 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: alexherwix's comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

  1. Most of my time will be spent do­ing similar things to last year, al­though I’ve only been work­ing full time for 9 months. I think in­no­va­tion, at least for me, hap­pens over time rather than as a one off pro­cess, with ideas be­ing formed and then be­ing tested to see what peo­ple like. One re­cent ex­am­ple is the com­mu­nity spotlight, which was an idea a few weeks ago and now has be­come a reg­u­lar post.

  In terms of tak­ing EA to the next level, there isn’t a plan to grow or hire more peo­ple but rather co­or­di­nate and sup­port nascent or­gani­sa­tions in Lon­don that can start do­ing other work and grow in­de­pen­dently.

  2. I will have a look

• DavidNash 17 Sep 2019 9:53 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: imben's comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

  There is a Face­book group and a small page on the web­site.

• DavidNash 17 Sep 2019 9:51 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: casebash's comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

  It’s not that I don’t want peo­ple to up­skill, it’s that I think it’s best done by peo­ple who have ex­pe­rience in that area, whether that is via a course or work­shop.

  In terms of get­ting peo­ple to meet in per­son, I agree that cer­tain talks/​work­shops/​themes can help at­tract differ­ent peo­ple, but the best out­comes from that aren’t usu­ally what peo­ple learn, but the con­nec­tions they make, and de­sign­ing a work­shop just to drive at­ten­dance may not be the most effi­cient way of get­ting peo­ple to at­tend.

Lat­est EA Up­dates for Au­gust 2019

• DavidNash 22 Aug 2019 19:25 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: richard_ngo's comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

  I agree with ev­ery­thing you said, I guess those three points aren’t things that I think about of­ten but might make sense to up­date the doc­u­ment to bet­ter re­flect that.

Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don Strat­egy 2019

• DavidNash 13 Aug 2019 19:56 UTC

  3 points

  on: Eval­u­at­ing Com­mu­nal Violence from an Effec­tive Altru­ist Perspective

  I may have missed this but does the $10 billion spent on peace build­ing pro­grams in 2016 in­clude spend­ing by gov­ern­ments, or is that just foun­da­tions?

• DavidNash 8 Aug 2019 11:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: 12 years of ed­u­ca­tion as a miss­ing cause priority

  I’m not sure that’s roughly true, EA pri­ori­ties also have to be ne­glected, gen­er­ally the most effec­tive in­ter­ven­tions are already taken by gov­ern­ments and large or­gani­sa­tions.